


And Baby Makes Four

by Orockthro



Series: Brought Home [1]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I know,” Harold said with the clarity of thought and determination that made everything he said important. “She needs a nanny.” He set the baby carrier by the door.</p><p>Or, Harold and John find themselves with a very small +1 and scheme to create a family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Baby Makes Four

**Author's Note:**

> An indulgence. Please forgive me.  
> All the thanks to vflick and rose_griffes for the beta work.

In the end what made the world different was something neither Harold nor his machine could predict: a traffic accident. The Cruzes had left Leila with a babysitter and headed out for a much needed date night. Their taxi and two other cars never made it out of the tunnel. Harold hadn’t hesitated. He was keying in new records before the newsreel about the tragic accident even finished playing, and a day later a social worker holding Leila showed up at Burdett’s brownstone offering his condolences and the custody paperwork for his godchild.

“Harold.” John put the pieces together quickly, his concept of normal flaking away.

“The Cruzes had no living relatives in the United States. She would have gone into the system, Mr. Reese.”

They stood in the library, Harold with a now much larger Leila in the front loaded Baby Bjorn. If she got any larger, and he imagined she would, as that’s what babies did, his back wouldn’t be able to support her. Reese stood with his arms crossed, eyeing the pile of dismantled guns he’d left on the table. “That’s what the system is _for_ , Finch. I love Leila too, but we can’t take care of her.”

Harold pulled in a long breath. He pulled Leila out and handed her to John who took her without hesitation. She was warm against his chest, her little arms snaking around his neck.

“I know,” Harold said with the clarity of thought and determination that made everything he said important. “She needs a nanny.” He set the baby carrier by the door.

****

Eleven days later ‘Officer Stills’ found himself standing outside Grace’s home holding a cooing one year old. Harold had made several things clear in the days that had passed. First, Leila was remaining under their care regardless of what John had to say about it, and second that a responsible, stable adult was required to make sure she had a responsible, stable childhood. To make the transition seamless, John had engineered casual run-ins with Grace twice on her walk in the park and once at her favorite coffee shop. It was standard procedure for gaining entry into a mark’s life.

Grace opened the door without hesitation; John decided they would have to work on that. “Detective Stills! What a surprise…” she trailed off as she saw Leila. Finch had dressed her in a cute set of overalls with a matching green hat. He’d taken great delight in picking out baby clothes for her. “You have a baby.” She blinked. “Come in! I’ll put some tea on if you’re staying for a minute or two.”

John let a smile slide over his face. She handled surprises well. That was good.

Grace hadn’t been his choice. Harold hadn’t suggested her by name either, but John didn't come out of the CIA without the ability to pick up on a few not-very-subtle suggestions. Harold’s continual strolls, with Leila no less, in the park in front of Grace’s home, the purchase of a set of finger paints for Leila to play with, and the constant trips to the art museum made his thought process fairly clear.

“This is Leila. She’s not mine; I’m afraid her parents are no longer with us. I was hoping that you might be willing to look after her today. Most of the other people I meet in my profession aren’t exactly... stable parent material. And I don’t want to hire a babysitter I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I know you work from home.” It was a good speech. He’d rehearsed it in his head before knocking on her door. He didn’t do that often, usually relying on intuition and verbal muscle memory to guide him through convincing people to do what he asked. But this was too important to leave to that.

Grace’s eyes did an impression of a pair of tea saucers. “What?”

“Just one day, that’s all. She’s a sweetie, aren’t you, Leila!”

Leila squealed happily from under her green hat.

“I can pay you, of course, for your time. But really, I’d consider it a huge favor.”

Grace stood still for a long time, the cold kettle in her hands. She was lit beautifully from the soft light of the park filtered through her white draped windows. John understood why Harold loved her. She licked her lips and put the tea kettle on the table. “Yes. Yes of course. I’ll get some work done while she’s napping.”

Harold had hinted at Grace as a daytime guardian for Leila, but it was John who made the decision and who put Leila in the arms of a woman he barely knew. Grace was a good person, he knew that from walking into her home unannounced that first time. She didn’t have many friends and most of her business connections long distance despite living in New York. She was a good person; someone Harold wanted desperately to protect, and even more desperately to see again. John was never any good at saying no to Harold.

John left her with a baby monitor, wired to broadcast to the library, and a set of toys, two of which had hidden cameras. “If you need anything, just call me. I’ll be here in a moment, no matter what.”

****

Harold sat in front of his computer monitors, two of them queued up to show the images from Leila’s baby toy cameras. He turned to face John, standing behind him in the shadow of a bookcase. “She wanted children, you know. But life just didn’t line up that way. She works too hard now, spends too much time alone. This will be good for her.”

“This is a bad idea, Harold.” John didn’t believe it, but it had to be said. If it went south, Harold would be destroyed.

“And yet you handled it very well, Mr. Reese.” Finch swiveled in his chair and looked back to the screens. Leila was playing happily on the floor in a playpen and Grace looked radiant, alternating between playing with the baby and making phone calls to her agent and publicist.

John didn’t reply, just began to pick up his arsenal and deposit it all into the locked gun safe Finch had bought. He left a handgun or two tucked into the top shelf of a few nonfiction stacks. Leila wouldn’t be tall enough to reach them for a long time, and he felt safer knowing he had options. Per Finch’s glare he made sure the clip and gun were stored separately.

That night, after they’d stopped a Number from melodramatically tossing his boyfriend off the top of a building, John went to Grace’s to collect Leila.

“She’s such a sweetie,” Grace said as she handed Leila back into John’s arms. If it was obvious that John was new to holding children, Grace didn’t comment. “What’s going to happen to her?”

It was warm in Grace’s home and soft yellow light spilled out of lamps, warding off the dark and damp of the October evening. “I don’t know. I’m keeping her for awhile at least. But I don’t know where she’ll end up.” Finch’s voice buzzed in his head, but he ignored him. “Would… would you be able to look after her tomorrow too?”

Grace’s mouth split into the biggest smile John had seen on anyone in a long, long time. He missed smiles like that. Jessica used to smile like that too, like no one in the world could ever make her sad again. “I’d love to.”

****

“Hello, Detective,” John purred into the phone. He had Leila on his lap. It was dark out and Finch had gone off to one of his properties. He’d been doing that less and less now that Leila was in their lives, but the ruse of countless identities had to be maintained. Leila had been in their care for almost two weeks.

“John. I was wondering when I’d hear from you. Things have been quiet around here.” Joss Carter had answered his call on the second ring. She was at work then. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering, at what age do children remember their lives?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “You didn’t kidnap another baby, did you?”

John smiled a little. It was late and he was tired but he couldn’t stop looking at Leila and wondering if she would remember the sound of bullets and the feeling of freezing to death next to a man who wasn’t her father. “Not _another_ baby, no.”

“God, John, what are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

Carter asked him questions, berated him in a gentle way, and he made small talk with her for another five minutes. It was a comfortable pattern for them, but Carter broke it like John knew she would. “Seriously, John, what do you think you’re doing? You’re not in a position to raise a child. What’s going to happen to her when I find you bleeding out somewhere? It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to me either.”

John didn’t say anything. He half hoped Carter would hang up on him, but she was too good an interrogator for that. “We have a contingency plan.”

****

By the end of the month, it was a comfortable pattern. Harold would get Leila ready for the day, feed her and make sure she was changed and had a supply of diapers and bottles packed in her carry bag. John would take her, bright and early, to Grace’s home. He wrote her the largest check she would accept and Harold made sure her agent kept finding work for her. Then the two of them would do whatever needed doing to keep a few more people in New York safe for just a little bit longer. The fact that theirs wasn’t a 9-5 job was something they’d both been pointedly ignoring. It was only a  matter of time until John was out on a mission far later than usual and Harold was busy trying to make sure he was alive and stayed that way.

Two days later when Stills, John, knocked on her door with a black eye and his left hand in a splint, she almost shut it on him again. “I thought you were dead.”

“I know.”

“I’m sick of people I care about dying.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You know, I called your department. Detective Stills went missing over a year ago. They told me I must have misheard you, because Detective Stills was probably dead in a gutter somewhere. And then they wanted to know if I had any information about that.”

John closed the door behind himself. She’d upgraded her deadbolt; it slid firmly into place.

“I want to know what’s going on. I’m sick of people lying to me, of being manipulated. I hate it. I want my life to be my own.”

It was snowing out. It was only November and the snow probably wouldn’t stick, but it turned the sky gray and somber and left Grace’s house feeling empty without the warm sunlight streaming in. Leila was asleep in the crib Grace had set up in the living room, the baby monitor flashing blue every three seconds on the stand by her head. He’d come here as soon as he’d been patched up by Harold’s shaking hands. He would have come sooner but for Harold’s quiet reminder that him showing up beaten to a bloody pulp wouldn’t help their cause.

“If I tell you what you want to know, you’ll never be able to go back to the life you had before. Ever. Your career as an artist will be over. You’ll have to move, your identity will have to be erased. All your friends and family will believe you’re dead and you will be able to do nothing to let them know otherwise. You don’t want to know, Grace.”

Finch was talking to him, his voice frantic and reverberating against the tiny bones in his ear. _“John… What are you doing?”_

Grace looked at him. “You don’t know what I want.”

“You started this,” John said to Harold in his ear.

Grace nodded and looked so eager, so serious. Pandora in front of the box.

He stood up and scooped Leila out of her crib and settled her against his chest. She stayed mercifully asleep. “Call me tomorrow if you still want to know. Take your time.”

When he returned to the library with Leila, Finch took her immediately and retreated to the nursery they had set up in the back. He slept there and didn’t say a word to John all night. John pretended not to care.

****

“You’re mad at me, then,” John said quietly. Just before lunch his phone had rung and Grace’s voice lit up his brain, _“I want to know.”_ He’d known when he’d offered Harold up to Grace there would be consequences, but he also knew that they would be fleeting. The benefits outweighed the cost, and making split second decisions on limited intelligence was part of his training.

Harold swiveled to peer at him. “Mad? No, John, I’m not mad; I’m terrified. I want to poke your eyes out and let you try and see the world then, but I read that violence in the home can cause psychological damage in toddlers.” He lowered his voice to a dangerous whisper, the whisper John hadn’t heard since they first started working together. “She’s going to die. You’ve condemned her to that. The people who are after the Machine won’t stop.”  

John was careful not to say that they’d condemned Grace the moment they’d asked her to babysit. He was sure Harold knew that too. “Everyone dies, Harold. Maybe now she won’t die thinking she’s alone.” John turned on the desk lamp. It had grown dark out and Harold had pointedly not turned anything on. “Besides, this is what you wanted. You couldn’t make the call, so I did.”

Harold swiveled back and returned his attention to the black screens. He didn’t turn them on. “Maybe I was hoping you had more sense than me.”

John smiled. “We both know I don’t.”

****

Grace met him at his loft. He wanted to bring her to the library, but Harold had said no, citing that one surprise at a time was plenty. John didn’t agree, but he admitted it wasn’t really his place to push. He settled Grace into the sofa he’d only sat on once and made two cups of green tea exactly the way Harold liked it, and handed one to her. “He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

Grace looked at the tea, looked at him, and suddenly got very pale. “Oh god. Oh god you can’t possibly mean...”

He excused himself, bundled Leila up, and told her to wait until he got back from his walk before leaving. Her hands were shaking around her mug.

John passed Finch in the hallway. He looked as pale as Grace. “It’s worth it,” John said, and he hoped he was right.

He took Leila on was a walk he’d taken many times before. He walked quickly to keep warm and tried to feel comforted by the weight of Leila against his chest, but he felt nerves roll in his gut. Nerves that, until Leila’s re-entry into their lives, had been trained out of him. He listened in on the conversation just long enough to hear Finch say, “Hello Grace,” and then, “do you remember when I said I had something to tell you about my employment and you said it could wait?” before clicking off the ear piece.

He came back an hour later to find them both still in his loft. Harold sat on the edge of his bed, his cheek red and swollen. Grace stood against his bathroom door with her hands stuck in her armpits. Both cups of tea sat on the table, cooled to room temperature and untouched.

“Anyone interested in donuts?” John asked and gently placed the box of glazed pastries on the coffee table next to the tea. Both Grace and Harold glared at him and John smiled. “They’re from the shop on 72nd.”

****

John’s calls to Carter, usually well past a reasonable hour for idle conversation, were becoming a bad habit. Maybe it was because she too had served in the army, maybe it was because she’d done all that and had a kid at home at the time, but she was a vital, if skeptical, source of parental information. And, he admitted, a comfort.

“John.” She had a way of making his name sound like an attack. “Is this a baby call or a police call? Because it’s one in the morning and I’m really tired.”

“How do you keep it all from Taylor?”

He heard bed sheets rustle and imagined Carter slinking out of bed and into the kitchen. He heard the hiss clunk of a refrigerator door being opened moments before his theory was corroborated. “You mean how do I keep my job and my home life separate?” He heard a slushing sound, probably milk. “It’s not easy. But it’s important. I don’t know what your setup is, but you should keep Leila out of it, if you can. That little girl deserves something at least close to normal.”

“I can’t lie to her.” Lies and deceit, the bread and butter of the operative’s world.

Carter sighed. “I’m not asking you to lie to her. Just make sure she has somewhere to call home that isn’t where you work. Make sure she meets other kids her age. And when you come home, make sure you’re at home, not at work. She’s too young to have questions now anyway. You have some time.”

“Hm.”

“Look, it’s your life, okay. I’m not over the moon about you bringing a child into your guns-a-blazing lifestyle, but she’s been good for you and I can tell you love her. So try not to traumatize her, okay? For me?”

John thought she probably meant it as a joke, and that the appropriate response would be to chuckle. He didn’t feel like laughing.

“This contingency plan of yours, it’s still in place, right?”

“I think so.”

“Well make sure, okay? And more than that, take care of yourself.”

“Why detective, it sounds almost like you care,” John drawled, trying to curve the conversation back towards normalcy, towards their cavalier pseudo-flirting.

“Shut up and go take care of your kid.” Even though it was one in the morning, John could hear Carter’s smile.

****

It took time. Grace moved into his loft and a gas leak conspicuously destroyed her entire life. If anyone noticed her art was moved to a curated private facility shortly before the disaster, no one raised any eyebrows. She read about her tragic death in the paper and dyed her hair golden and bought a pair of big silver glasses. John pointed out that her new look was hardly inconspicuous, and she’d snapped back that if he and Harold could look good in death then so could she. And she looked very good.

Suddenly they had a life together. Harold and John worked out of the library minding the Numbers, but returned to the loft when they weren’t working. Grace looked after Leila happily, and under the penname Goldilocks, was gaining a reputation as an anonymous artist. Her work, delivered by a confidential courier service, was on display at two galleries who had no idea who she was.

“It was never the recognition I wanted anyway,” Grace said told John. They looked down through binoculars from the roof of the building opposite the gallery where Goldilock’s work was being shown. “No one knows illustrators. I just wanted my paintings to be seen. I think that if something is seen, then it’s alive.” A crowd of people gathered in front of one of her watercolors.

And all the while Leila remained a happy, chubby baby nearing her second birthday.

“You know I love Leila, right?” she said as John peeled back an ace bandage from his ribs and compared his bruising to a sheet of paint strips. It was nearing eggplant. They were considering repainting the loft and expanding into neighboring apartment. Harold owned the building so it was only a question of when to expand and how big to go. “I love her, and I love you guys. So please stop asking me to take care of her every day like you think I’m going to up and leave. I’m not a babysitter, I’m…”

Harold stood in the doorway with an ice pack in his hands. Grace, with Leila on her hip (although Leila was fast growing too big to be hauled around like that) stood between them in the loft’s bathroom. Harold just looked at her like he’d been the one gut-punched, not John.

Grace stood her ground. “I’m family.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love!


End file.
